They are showcasing topics and authors that might not be on everyone's radar, but despite the misleading headline, these are not all available for free. Readers will have access to select chapters of select books as well as some journal articles and blog posts. So in the end, it's a neat round up of works where an unfortunately small portion has actually been made available to download/read. But if you have time to browse - have fun!

Saturday, February 24, 2018

"When Beyoncé tells all the fly chicks to get in formation, she is asking us to get our shit together so we can do the work that needs to be done. An the stakes are high as hell, because Black people are being killed. So, she reminds us, 'Slay, trick. Or you get eliminated.' Now that might be a reference to some kind of dance competition. But it's also a revision of 'Never let them catch you slipping.' Be the best. Be exceptional. Or get eliminated."

Part memoir, part lecture series, these essays cover some serious ground. Cooper tackles everything from domestic abuse to intersectional feminism to Respectability Politics and the racism within the War on Drugs - all informed by personal experience but transformed into well-researched lessons on deconstructive sociology. The title was born from her journey learning to channel rage at injustice into productive, academic pursuits and it perfectly captures the thematic undercurrent of collection.

Cooper is well-educated and well spoken, a self-designated know-it-all and high achiever. This is both a strength and a weakness in her narrative voice. She is obviously brilliant and her insights challenge the reader, forcing us to reconsider our own preconceptions. But at times this is preached with a level of certainty that sidesteps her own personal journey: the roundabout mental side-streets that she has taken to end up with her current understanding of the world. Much of the book showcases how her beliefs have evolved over time with little forgiveness for those who still exist in these planes of ignorance. I certainly had a lot to learn from these essays, so perhaps this criticism comes from my own internal defensiveness. Actually yea, that's probably it. Still, Cooper herself says, "Intersectionality is not only not objective, it sneers at claims to objectivity, arguing that none of us is purely objective. We all come with a perspective and an agenda. We all have investments. We all have skin in the game." So part of this learning process is for us as readers to acknowledge our own sets of privilege and being willing to listen to each other's experiences and truths without judgement. Another part is taking a step back from our knee-jerk defensiveness and rather than saying to yourself "But I'm one of the good ones!" ask yourself, "What if I'm one of the bad ones?" and work from there.

Eloquent Rage is an excellent and necessary book that is somehow as funny and irreverent as it is solemn and deadly fucking serious. Highly recommend it to anyone interested in Black Feminism - in Cooper's own words, "America needs a homegirl intervention in the worst way." The text falls somewhere between Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in PowerandRoxane Gay's Bad Feminist on the highbrow-to-accessible scale of discourse (both of which are obviously also fantastic and eye-opening in their own right). To wrap up, here are some gem pull-quotes:

"All voters should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there's a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else's exclusion. There's a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group's demands visible make every other group's political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math."

"The term 'feminist killjoys' is well-earned. Sometimes, in the bid for rightness, feminists and hyperwoke folks can take the joy out of everything. I actually think its irresponsible to wreck shop in people's world without giving them the tools to rebuild. It's fine to quote Audre Lorde* to people and tell them, 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' The harder work is helping people find better tools to work with. We have to smash the patriarchy, for sure. And we have to dismantle white supremacy, and homophobia, and a whole bunch of other terrible shit that makes life difficult for people. Rage is great at helping us to destroy things. That's why people are so afraid of it."

Saturday, February 17, 2018

World War I rages in Europe and teen Robert Weekes is stuck at home in rural Montana, desperate to join the war efforts. He's dreamed of enlisting in the elite Rescue & Evac squad for as long as he can remember, but there are more than a few hurdles in his path. He'd need to become an expert empirical philosopher, or sigilrist: a practitioner well-versed in the art of drawing sigils to manipulate physical forces and matter (think magic without wands). Even though his tough-as-nails war-hero mother has taught him the basics, this cryptic field of study is so heavily dominated by women that men are rarely, if ever, train professionally. His talents eventually land him a university scholarship, but it's only the beginning of the trials and tribulations he must face to pursue his dream.

The Philosopher's Flight is a fun light read that pairs plausible alchemy with civil rights activism and rolls it all into an adventurous coming of age tale. Though it reads like a YA novel, it doesn't shy away from the darkness and violence that accompanies systemic oppression. I really enjoyed the "gender-flip" here-- it's a complex and nuanced reversal of the script. Even though women seem to have more of an aptitude for sigilry it certainly doesn't translate into total control over society. They are respected in some spheres and denounced in others, existing in a space somewhere between mutants in the X-Men Universe and the "witches" on trial in Salem. As an added dimension we get a quick glimpse into the dynamics of race relations in early 1900's America, but for the most part this remains unexplored.

Fans of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality will appreciate the effort Miller makes to ground empirical philosophy in science. The magical forces in the story are mysterious but not impenetrable (we get at least one character trying to decipher how the packets of magic energy travel in space). Plus with all the focus on rescue missions and medical applications of sigils, it's really no surprise the author is an EMT turned ER Doctor (turned novelist!).

In all honesty, I wasn't hooked until about three-fourths of the way through when suddenly, I couldn't put it down. The first parts build up the slow simmering of tension and context until finally it all explodes into a rolling boil of drama that leaves you wanting more. According to this interview with author Tom Miller (which also details how his observations of subtle sexism as an EMT helped inform the novel) it's going to be a five part series. So that's exciting. Can't wait to see how this alternate-history world progresses. If stalking the webiste of the publisher is any indication, we may have "Philosopher's War" to look forward to (though Goodreads seems to indicate this is just an outdated alternate title/cover for Flight).

// I received The Philosopher's Flight as part of my subscription to Book of the Month

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

"I find myself to be radically discontinuous with myself."

Feel Free is a phenomenal round up of Zadie Smith's articles and essays over the last ten or so years. Not all of the pieces were for me personally (specifically the heavy dose of highbrow lit crit), but man, the rest really struck me down to my core. So whether you identify as a writer, reader, artist, musician, historian philosopher, millennial, gen-Xer, black, white, or mixed: there's something that will speak to you, trust me. Together the essays weave a rich tapestry of voices, all varying shades of Smith. Deeply personal experiences presented alongside stoic, critical analyses. She waxes poetic on the importance of libraries, how technology shifts reality, pluralism and the significance of race, why she was terrified of writing in the first person and oh yeah this one time she burned down her Italian apartment. Seriously, something for everyone.

I went with the audiobook (shout-out to narrator Nikki Amuka-Bird for knocking it out of the fucking park) not thinking about the fact that listening to a book makes it super tedious to bookmark or make note of beautiful passages. Soon what started as me googling to find a few direct quotes snowballed into a quest to find all 31+ essays. Turns out, of the essays that had been previously published, most are available online! Some live behind paywalls, some are available as previews but ultimately require a subscription, and some are freebies open to the public. One's even in German so viel Glück damit...

I didn't collect all of these links to stick it to the publishing industry or help people bypass checking out the book for themselves. Just thought it'd be nice to compile the works into one easy-to-access spot for anyone else wanting to reference the texts digitally. Our benevolent overlords at Google Books have a ctrl+f-able preview available but it's not really the same.

Saturday, January 27, 2018

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror
by Mallory Ortberg
To Be Published: March 2018

Thanks to Disney's whimsical remakes of capital "R" Romantic folklore, my only childhood exposure to fairytales was cheerful princesses singing their way to happy endings surrounded by industrious animal friends. But we're all adults here. I think by now, we all know these are just sugar-coated versions of some pretty gnarly source material.

The Merry Spinster meets us somewhere in the middle with 11 twisted versions of well known fables and fairy tales that are somehow as playful as they are sinister. The shorts are adapted from Mallory Ortberg's series Children's Stories Made Horrific from the now defuncttemporarily offline The-Toast.net1. It's certainly not required that you know the OG classical versions of the stories to understand what's going on, but it can't hurt (so here they are!) As with any sort of parody, the better the grasp you have on what is being referenced, the more you'll get to wryly smirk to yourself as you read along.

"The danger of silence is that someone who wishes to hear a yes will not go out of his way to listen for a no.- "The Six Boy-Coffins", The Merry Spinster 2

If scary stories aren't really your jam, just know that these aren't necessarily as gruesome as fairy tales of yore (...okay, maybe some are). Rather, they're well-crafted and sly in their horror-- the truly chilling undercurrents are the social mores, the patriarchy, and what we endure in the name of love. This is where Ortberg's particular brand of dry dark comedy really shines through. Much like her debut book, Texts from Jane Eyre, the language and style remain faithful to originals, a truly gritty homage.

Reading through past interviews, I feel like Ortberg's love for the titlemight be what willedthe rest of the book into existence. It's super fitting too: the Merry Spinster archetype may be the only uplifting motif running through these bleak pages. So on that note, here's a quote from the author explaining the concept beautifully:

"I would always love for my next book to be a light comic novella called The Merry Spinster and to explore those themes of glorious female solitude. I think female solitude is a mental condition as well as a physical state. You can be married and a spinster. I think spinster is an identity every woman can claim, if she will. … I feel like a lot of women, or a lot of feminists, joke about taking to the sea or living alone in a cottage as this kind of fun freedom."

// I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Quotes are taken from an advanced readers copy and may not be final. Please refer to a finished copy.

// Footnotes1. The Toast is dead, long live The Toast...You'd better believe as soon as it's back online I'm linking the shit out of it.2. This is a random art card from the Smith-Waite tarot deck and has nothing to do with the book, but I tweaked it a teensy bit and now it's just PERFECT you'll see.